York baby who died of head trauma puts focus on shaken babies

Since her granddaughter died in 2004, Bonnie Bowers has spent her days on Facebook and other Internet sites, reaching out to parents to teach them about the options for dealing with that overwhelmed feeling of a crying baby.

“We sit here and cry,” said Bowers, whose son-in-law was convicted of shaking and killing his 4-month-old daughter. “We just cannot believe that it’s so hard to get through to people that do not understand what can happen when you shake a baby.”

Friday, Dauphin County Coroner Graham Hetrick said an 11-month-old York city baby boy who died at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center was also the victim of head trauma caused by child abuse.

Hetrick said the child was brain dead when he was taken off life support.

The boy is the second midstate infant to die of head trauma this year and the third case of deadly infant abuse.

The infant’s father, Yohan Alfredo Ramirez-Herrera, 26, is being sought by city police on homicide charges. He was last known to live at 48 S. Penn St. in York. Authorities did not release the boy’s name or other details about the case.

Shaken baby syndrome is a commonly used term for head trauma in infants. Recent studies show the number of cases in Pennsylvania were rising until 2009 but have since dropped off.

Advocates attribute that to better education for parents in how to deal with the stress of child rearing.

The York County case, the arrest of a South Middleton Twp. dad in September, and the recent arrest of a Perry County couple accused of neglecting their 7-month-old boy are painful reminders of the need for more help for stressed-out parents, Bowers said.

Bowers began the Miranda Joy Foundation after her son-in-law was sent to federal prison to serve a 12½- to 25- year sentence for the death of his daughter. She uses social media to reach out to parents.

Monday will be the eighth anniversary of the day doctors told her daughter Amy that 4-month-old Miranda Raymond wouldn’t live through the next day.

“And it doesn’t hurt any less,” Bowers said. “We do understand what it’s like to live with grief.”

The number of Pennsylvania babies injured or killed because of head trauma doubled between 2003 and 2009.

Part of that might be the added stress on parents caused by the recession — the spike was most noticeable in 2007, 2008 and 2009, when it peaked at 104.

But another part of it was better tracking of these cases, said Dr. Mark Dias, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Hershey Medical Center.

Dias is the lead investigator for the shaken baby syndrome prevention and awareness program, which is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and educates new parents in hospital birthing rooms.

In upstate New York, where the program is also in place, there has been more than a 50 percent reduction in shaken baby and abusive head trauma, Dias said.

“Our incidents rate in upstate New York in 17 counties is actually 45 percent lower than reported incidents rates from around the world,” he said.

In Pennsylvania, the success rate hasn’t been as high, but there are signs it’s working.

Cases dropped to 80 in 2010. As of Friday, the number is 46.

“If our trend continues ... we are down another 20 cases,” Dias said.

Dias’ numbers are based on what doctors see in hospitals, not what is logged as abuse by the state Department of Welfare. Many advocates said that’s because Pennsylvania’s definition skews the number of actual abuse cases.

Right now, unless an adult is identified as a perpetrator, a child’s abuse injuries aren’t recorded, said Cathleen Palm, executive director of the Protect Our Children Committee.

“How we’re recording that and measuring that ... it should really be about what’s happening to a child versus what’s happening to an adult,” Palm said. “It’s hard to definitively measure whether preventions are working if we don’t have a baseline for that.”

Tuesday, the state Senate Aging and Youth Committee held a hearing at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, where Department of Public Welfare officials and a panel of physicians testified in support of creating an independent task force that could redefine the state’s definition of child abuse.

Palm was among those who testified.

“There’s a disconnect between what we know is happening to children on the ground and our numbers,” she said.

In his research, Dias found that problem quickly.

“When we first started tracking this, we found there were several cases falling off the radar screen,” he said.

Prosecutors in Dauphin and Cumberland counties said they’ve noticed that many parents or caregivers who abuse infants fall into one or more of three categories: Drug or alcohol abuse, economic hardship and overwhelming stress.

Sometimes, they just snap.

Justin Thompson, who is charged with the murder of his 4-week-old daughter Ahzyre, told police he shook his daughter for three to five seconds because she wouldn’t stop crying in the middle of the night.

It doesn’t take much, because a baby doesn’t have fully developed neck muscles and their heads are proportionally bigger than their bodies, Hetrick said.

“As the baby grows, there is a little more protection,” he said, referring to the York County case. “But you are pretty helpless at 11 months. Believe me, it isn’t easy to sit there and perform an autopsy on an 11-month-old child and sit there and look at the innocence.”

FOR HELP

To get help from the shaken baby syndrome prevention and awareness program, call 717-531-7498.

Jordan Kauffman: 7-months-old, died Jan. 28. His Perry County parents are charged with involuntary manslaughter.

Ahzyre Thompson: 4-weeks-old, died Sept. 1. Her father, Justin Thompson, was charged after admitting to shaking his daughter, police said.

Baby boy in York, 11 months, died Oct. 4. Police have not released his name, but said his father, Yohan Alfredo Ramirez-Herrera, is being sought on homicide charges. Police are still conducting interviews, but the Dauphin County coroner has labeled the death a homicide and called it a case of child abuse.

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